Wunderlust

Wunderground: Providence, 1995 to the present
September 15, 2006 through January 7, 2007
At The RISD Museum, 224 Benefit Street, Providence.

A show featuring the approximately one gagillion silkscreened, drawn, painted, collaged and crazy posters created in providence over the past ten years, mostly made at or promoting events at underground venues such as Fort Thunder. Take serious note that by "posters" I don't so much mean "posters" as "rabidly unique pieces of art that just happen to be primarily 2-dimensional and could, conceivably, be adhered to a wall". Show also features sound/light/sculpture installations by a few of Providence's infamous underground artists.

I was going to say “now for a break from talk about things that happen in museums” but then I realized that, crap of all craps, the Wunderland show is happening at the RISD museum, which is not only a Museum but a University Museum which I suppose makes it all the more loaded a venue. But I’m not going to talk any more about museums right now because I would prefer to talk about Fort Thunder.

The printing studio at the erstwhile Fort Thunder. Gah. If you follow the link to the current Fort Thunder website be forewarned that when you click the mysterious links your computer will automatically start playing clips of incorrigably experimental noise music.

If you’re from Providence, you know what Fort Thunder was (and, in a way, still is) and if you’re not you will probably not be terrible enlightened by this wikipedia entry but it’s a start:

Fort Thunder was a warehouse on the second floor of a pre-Civil War former textile factory in the Olneyville district of Providence, Rhode Island. The space was used from 1995 through 2001 as a venue for underground music and events. It was known for its colorful posters promoting these shows posted on walls around Providence.

The Fort Thunder Bike Pile and a link to another article.

At various times they hosted costumed wrestling and halloween mazes. Several artists lived and worked there; this group of artists is also sometimes referred to as "Fort Thunder."

In 2001, the building was destroyed by Feldco developers to make way for the parking lot of a Shaw's grocery store.

Every small city thinks that its underground creative scene inhabits the deepest and most fertile cave, but Providence really does have a certain royal status here. Fort Thunder and several other artistic beehives like it [Dirt Palace et al. And don't forget that the Hive Archive is still around] have been the architectural-locational manifestations of a wild, raging DIY art and music scene in Providence for the last decade or so. The artists, writers, wrestlers and musicians that have bubbled and boiled and thrived in these strange spots have produced work that’s gained wide notoriety and, over time, created a supremely distinct “Providence Style”. (Or is it specifically an Olneyville Style? I don’t know if there’s an official consensus on this, but I think that official consensuses are pretty much verboten in the Providence/Olneyville Style, as is the idea that there’s really any one unifying “style” at all).

I really, forcefully suggest you go see this show.

If you didn’t go on opening night, perhaps it was because you are claustrophobic or for some reason didn’t want to remember a particularly traumatizing night when you got lost in Fort Thunder’s radon-and-mask-filled hallways and ran into Brian Chippendale hanging upside down in the dark making a scary noise. Because the opening drew such a huge crowd, filled with so many familiar yet somehow nameless faces, that despite the RISD museum’s white healthiness, it WAS uncannily like being at one of the performances at Fort Thunder (both in visual and olfactory impact).


The work itself is massively innovative (I literally just remembered the word “innovative” while I was writing my last post, and it’s going to be burning a hole in my lexicon if I don’t use it a lot right now). The poster artists work with strange subject matter, using odd materials, tons of texture, and colors that include metallic gold and something I can only describe as “trepidation teal”. A lot of these artists are prolific wheatpasters and their artwork has been seen in a lot of unexpected public places.

The show also features a whole room of installations utilizing sound, light, projection, spheres, wires, paper mache and something that looks like the gigantic root of some dreadfully huge raddish. You’ll need to see it for yourself, largely because you have to climb into most of the pieces yourself.

I’m not sure what else to say. This stuff is amazing and simultaneously creates and destroys vast new worlds. Of course there's the occasional boring piece. If anyone were reading this blog I’d be nervous to say this, but the underground music and art in Providence can, like anything genuinely experimental, sometimes get lost and cross the line from “exploratory” into “disaterous, flaming poo-bag”. But the fact that Providence’s most lasting art legacy is one made up of questionably appropriated spaces, outrageously non-traditional images and terrifyingly groundbreaking lifestyles is something that makes me proud. It’s inspiring as hell, and reminds me to continue with things like the Project Digs shows and my own nacent projects to help ensure that the Prov DIY scene doesn’t end.

If there’s one thing creepier than anything else in the Wunderland show it’s the way it seems to be presenting the Providence/Olneyville Underground Art Shebang as a finite project that can be viewed as a whole, finite phenomenon, thereby implying that it’s through and done with. Hope not.

I kind of thought we weren't supposed to see Brian Chippendale without a mask but here you have him.